On a Darcy-Stefan Problem arising in freezing and thawing of saturated porous media

Abstract

A model with phase change for material convection in a saturated porous medium with a frozen region is formulated as a Darcy-Stefan problem. We propose a new generalized formulation for this Stefan-type problem with convection governed by Darcy’s law. This approach, which is valid for irregular geometries with irregular subregions, has the advantage of not requiring the smoothness of the temperature, that restricted previous mathematical works to two-dimensional particular cases. We show existence of generalized solutions, passing to the limit in suitable approximated problems, which in principle can be solved numerically by the finite element method.